In December, 2014, J.C.A. Jordens and others reported in Nature (2014; DOI: 10.1038/nature13962) that Homo erectus made geometric designs in shells found at Trinil on Java. The designs are between 430,000 and 540,000 years old. Euclid should have been a paleoanthropologist.
What is our fascination with geometric design? We have a seeming affinity for it while we reject its study. In high school we might say, “Well, some adult must have some use for this somewhere.” Later, some who made such a statement might become physicists that constantly seek to understand the universe by studying and describing its non-Euclidean geometry. Others might devote their adult energies to work on the geometry of 3D imaging for purposes as diverse as medical diagnoses and architectural designs.
We will probably never know the exact purpose of the geometric scratches that H. erectus made on those shells. For our purposes, however, the shells are highly instructive. Those simple scratches that appear to make letter Ms or Ws (depending on the orientation) tell a story of intelligence and creativity about five times older than the creators of the next oldest “writing.”
Someone had some time on his or her hands; life was not so grueling. Someone had a moment both to design and to carry out that design. Such a design was probably (I’m guessing, of course) shared. That makes those geometric scratches the first written language, produced, we have to admit, by a predecessor species. Embarrassing, isn’t it? Here we are 500,000 years later thinking that we’re the end all and be all of consciousness and self-awareness when, in reality, we stand at the end of a very long chain of thinkers and doers. And we’re still either putting geometry to very practical use in our daily lives or obsessing over its connection to our universe.
Say we don’t blow ourselves up in a nuclear holocaust. Say that no asteroid or comet larger than a football field hits the planet. Say that diseases or pests don’t eliminate humans. Oh! Let’s throw it all together: Say that nothing interferes with the continuation of our species or some evolutionary offspring for the next 500,000 years. What then? Looking back, paleoanthropologists will see some bones that date to our present and find a number of strange markings on tombstones and cornerstones. They might even discover in some remnant drainage ditch a geometry that suggests careful design. “Hey,” the researchers will remark, “We think we have good evidence that an ancestor race was intelligent and creative.”
Will it be your bones and your geometric language that they find? Want to leave your mark? Start scratching, and leave durable clues why you scratched.
What is our fascination with geometric design? We have a seeming affinity for it while we reject its study. In high school we might say, “Well, some adult must have some use for this somewhere.” Later, some who made such a statement might become physicists that constantly seek to understand the universe by studying and describing its non-Euclidean geometry. Others might devote their adult energies to work on the geometry of 3D imaging for purposes as diverse as medical diagnoses and architectural designs.
We will probably never know the exact purpose of the geometric scratches that H. erectus made on those shells. For our purposes, however, the shells are highly instructive. Those simple scratches that appear to make letter Ms or Ws (depending on the orientation) tell a story of intelligence and creativity about five times older than the creators of the next oldest “writing.”
Someone had some time on his or her hands; life was not so grueling. Someone had a moment both to design and to carry out that design. Such a design was probably (I’m guessing, of course) shared. That makes those geometric scratches the first written language, produced, we have to admit, by a predecessor species. Embarrassing, isn’t it? Here we are 500,000 years later thinking that we’re the end all and be all of consciousness and self-awareness when, in reality, we stand at the end of a very long chain of thinkers and doers. And we’re still either putting geometry to very practical use in our daily lives or obsessing over its connection to our universe.
Say we don’t blow ourselves up in a nuclear holocaust. Say that no asteroid or comet larger than a football field hits the planet. Say that diseases or pests don’t eliminate humans. Oh! Let’s throw it all together: Say that nothing interferes with the continuation of our species or some evolutionary offspring for the next 500,000 years. What then? Looking back, paleoanthropologists will see some bones that date to our present and find a number of strange markings on tombstones and cornerstones. They might even discover in some remnant drainage ditch a geometry that suggests careful design. “Hey,” the researchers will remark, “We think we have good evidence that an ancestor race was intelligent and creative.”
Will it be your bones and your geometric language that they find? Want to leave your mark? Start scratching, and leave durable clues why you scratched.
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